“Uh, genuine question: How is this legal?” Mikayla Nogueira asks incredulously in her signature brash Boston accent, addressing her 17 million TikTok followers. Wearing eyelashes that seem to extend to her forehead and her hair full of rollers, she holds a Lucite tray of beauty products. Expensive brands such as Nars and Dior sit next to knockoff versions with almost indistinguishable packaging.

“This brand is called MCoBeauty, and they basically copy all of the viral products,” Nogueira explains in the video. That’s a pretty good summary of its business model. Technically, MCo (pronounced “EM-ko”) sells “dupes,” slang for “duplicates,” a term beauty aficionados use to describe affordable versions of more expensive products.

Those familiar with Sephora’s shelves will recognise a lot of MCo products, even though they’re not sold there. MCo offers dozens of dupes for items like Sol de Janeiro’s bestselling body mists, with their colourful fluid and distinctive labels, and Estée Lauder’s Advanced Night Repair serum in the classic brown bottle, which is so recognisable that the product is simply called “little brown bottle” in China. MCo prices range from about $3.50 for a heart-shaped powder puff and top out at $20-ish for skin-care items. The originals usually cost multiples more.

MCo has had a very big couple of years. It’s the No. 1-selling beauty brand in its native Australia, outselling drugstore stalwarts such as Maybelline. It entered the US in April 2024 and is carried in about 1,500 locations of Kroger Co.’s family of grocery stores and almost all of Target Corp.’s nearly 2,000 stores. In Kroger it’s risen to become one of the top five cosmetics brands, and it’s become a Target bestseller in less than a year. It also sells on Amazon.com and its own direct-to-consumer site, and it’s been released in the UK.

In February 2025, Australian pharmaceutical company DBG Health Pty Ltd. purchased Sydney-based MCo at a A$1 billion ($653.7 million) valuation, according to Australia’s Financial Review. DBG owns the largest generic medication manufacturer in the country—and what are generics, if not dupes? MCo’s revenue was more than A$400 million for the fiscal year ended March 2025, according to DBG Chairman and group Chief Executive Officer Dennis Bastas; DBG’s burgeoning stable of beauty brands has had more than 30 percent growth so far this year.

MCo’s ascendancy comes at a fraught economic time, when consumer products, generally, and luxury beauty products, specifically, are becoming increasingly inaccessible for shoppers. (Earlier this year, Louis Vuitton introduced $160 lipsticks.) The colossal beauty industry is still expanding, but now mass and prestige markets are “converging,” according to Circana, a market-research company; people are hunting for better-priced beauty. Seventy-two percent of US consumers say affordability is the primary appeal of dupes, data from research firm Mintel show; 53 percent of American women age 18 to 34 have purchased beauty dupes.

But MCo has heartily embraced its dupe identity and taken the concept further than any other brand, flirting heavily with crossing one of the last red lines in beauty. Although there are products that pushed the limits of inspiration too far, most brands are careful to change the appearance of their copies, not just for fear of lawsuits but also because branding is one of the only distinguishing factors left in the industry. MCo’s extreme duping has resulted in legal challenges, with two active lawsuits against it and two settled ones. The company has always been unapologetic, and even defiant, about its methods.

“By actually making things accessible to more people in different socioeconomic brackets, we’re providing a form of innovation,” says Meridith Rojas, chief marketing officer for North America at VidaCorp, the DBG subsidiary that houses its beauty and personal-care brands. She’s MCo’s most public-facing evangelist, often deployed to give interviews to industry publications and podcasts. MCo has plenty of competition from e.l.f Cosmetics, Milani, Essence, NYX and even Trader Joe’s, but Rojas says MCo stands out because it’s “democratising luxury.” MCo isn’t only promising a cheaper powder; it’s also providing a close facsimile of both the form and function of a $49 Charlotte Tilbury powder. She calls it a “360 experience.”

The Pull of the Beauty Dupe

Beauty consumers “don’t want something that’s a Payless version—they don’t want something in a bottle or in a package that looks and feels cheap,” Rojas says. “We think that just having the formula be similar isn’t really enough.”

Dupes, which most people would simply call knockoffs, are rampant in retail: Think Zara and its runway copies, the many Eames-esque chairs on Wayfair and Quince’s versions of everything from Away’s hard-shell suitcases to cult supplement AG1. Beauty dupes go back at least to the 1980s, when Designer Imposters fragrances announced its source of inspiration right on its cans of body mist: “If you like Giorgio, you’ll love Primo!” For years drugstore shelves have been full of store-brand products, such as CVS’s blue-capped dandruff shampoo that’s reminiscent of Head & Shoulders.

But nothing has driven dupe-mania the way TikTok has, says Clare Hennigan, an analyst at Mintel. The platform catapults products to virality quickly and shortens the length of trend cycles. TikTok can even make entire categories take off on the strength of a single super popular product.

TikTok has also elevated dupe culture to respectability. What used to have an undercurrent of shame has been “rebranded,” Hennigan says. You may still be embarrassed to admit you carry a fake Prada bag, but you have bragging rights if you found an $8 substitute for a fancy blush. “Dupe culture is a currency,” Rojas says. “There’s actually a bunch of cachet in finding a great dupe.”

TikTok beauty influencers such as Nogueira frequently offer lower-priced options to their followers; some, like Nina Pool, have made it their entire online identity. Pool has almost 6 million followers and is known for her “duperoonie” recommendations. Milk Makeup’s distinctive green, jellylike Hydro Grip Primer, a frequent dupe target meant to be worn under makeup, costs $38. (Yes, MCo makes one.) One of Pool’s more popular videos suggests using $2 aloe vera from Walgreens instead. “YOU ARE THE BEST WE ARE BEING SCAMMED LEFT AND RIGHT” reads the top comment, which has more than 28,000 likes.

Some dupes are dupier than others. Fragrances, for example, usually can’t be trademarked. They’re also easier to copy, because with the right equipment, formulators can quantify the amount of a perfume’s individual constituents, says Ramya Viswanathan, a cosmetic chemist and the founder of hair-care company Cmpressd Beauty. That doesn’t mean it will smell exactly the same, because the raw materials used by the duper might be cheaper substitutes or purposely more diluted.

Skin care and makeup are harder. Although ingredients are listed on the packaging, the amounts can’t easily be surmised. And there are variously priced versions of ingredients such as hyaluronic acid, which may perform differently. “The idea of dupes is to be cheaper, even to the company that’s making it,” Viswanathan says. “So a lot of times there is a compromise on some of the ingredients.”

Pigment loads and textures often differ slightly. MCo’s makeup seems to be more pigmented than some of what it’s copying, and shades aren’t always spot-on. They sometimes smell different too: In a comparison between an MCo serum and its Glow Recipe counterpart, for example, the scent is red Kool-Aid versus subtle fresh-pressed watermelon.

Mco’s Singular Story

Before MCo became famous for copying, it was a product innovator itself. Australian founder Shelley Sullivan parlayed a job as a receptionist at a modeling agency into entrepreneurship, founding Shelley’s Model Management Group in 1994 when she was 21. There are different versions of the story tracking her subsequent leap to beauty. According to a recent podcast retelling, she noticed models were singeing their eyelids while trying to use a blow-dryer aimed at a standard eyelash curler. Sullivan had wanted to start a beauty brand anyway, so she created a heated lash curler in 2002, promoted by the likes of fellow Aussies Kylie Minogue and Elle Macpherson.

It grew into ModelCo, with items including a “tan in a can” spray, which was cutting-edge for the time. The brand was positioned as an alternative to the stodgier heritage brands of the era, with its hot pink packaging and fashion-adjacent bona fides. It took off in Australia and Europe but wasn’t well known in the US. In 2016, ModelCo released a makeup collection with future Rhode founder Hailey Bieber, then known as Hailey Baldwin, and, in 2018, a collaboration with fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld.

Sullivan noticed the prestige beauty landscape, where ModelCo was positioned, was getting too crowded, with not enough “masstige” brands—a category more elevated than mass, such as CoverGirl, but cheaper than prestige, like MAC. Right before the pandemic, she introduced MCo as a diffusion brand and sold it at an Australian supermarket chain called Woolworths. From the beginning, MCo offered dupes, though the company didn’t really start garnering attention for it until popular Australian comedian Celeste Barber signed on as an ambassador in 2021 and more people became aware of the brand. (Sullivan declined to be interviewed for this story.)

This is when DBG took notice. Originally, Bastas was looking for a skin-care brand to buy, seeing it as a way to “leverage adjacent categories” to sell in Australian pharmacies, where DBG has a large customer base for its over-the-counter meds. But as he watched MCo outperform brands such as L’Oréal Paris and Revlon in his home market, he saw an opportunity to, ahem, dupe that success and build something bigger. “I like working on products with lots of volume,” Bastas says.

In 2022, DBG Health purchased a 50 percent stake in MCo when it was doing A$30 million in sales. DBG bought out Sullivan in February 2025 for at least A$500 million, according to the Financial Review. The plan is to build a mass-priced beauty platform within DBG, and Bastas is looking to acquire more beauty brands. Nude by Nature, a so-called clean makeup brand DBG bought after it invested in MCo, is in Kroger in the US and will launch in Walmart Inc.’s stores next year.

DBG shuttered the higher-priced ModelCo after the acquisition, and Sullivan walked away, signing with Hollywood talent agency CAA. She told Forbes Australia she was hoping to work with celebrities to introduce beauty brands. MCo’s former head of finance is suing the company, alleging he was overworked by Sullivan and bullied by Bastas during the acquisition process. “Every deal negotiation has a little bit of drama,” Bastas says when asked about the suit, noting he had the right to “expect people to do things in a professional manner.” A spokeswoman for Sullivan told the Financial Review, “Self-evidently, these are untested allegations that are yet to be adjudicated upon. Given this matter is before the court, she will not [be] making any further comment.”

Like fast-fashion retailers, MCo relies on speed to market. “We can turn around a product from concept to stores in about six months, which is, I would say, industry-leading,” says Greg Barker, MCo’s executive vice president in the Americas, crediting its network of 200 suppliers. (Fast beauty is still much slower than fast fashion, which can produce wares within days to weeks.) Traditionally a new beauty product can take two to three years to bring to market.

Just don’t call MCo cheap. “We know we have to meet a low price point,” Bastas says. “But if we have to sacrifice margin in order to produce a high-quality product, that’s what we do.” Although not every product reads as elevated, plenty of consumers have been impressed by their performance, posting to social media to show off just how well they work.

Selling the Same, for Less

Recruiting an army of actual influencers has also been a key strategy for MCo. It’s worked with Pool, and the company recently tapped the Lipstick Lesbians, influencers known for their product formulation knowledge, to analyse MCo’s dupes compared with their originals in a TikTok. It works with about 5,000 influencers, a third of whom are paid, the rest seeded with products. Posts about MCo on TikTok cumulatively average about 16 million weekly views, up 112 percent from a year earlier as of September 2025, according to Spate, a consumer trend company. Two of the hashtags most associated with the brand are #ad and #dupe.

In early 2025, MCo hired Bethenny Frankel, the Skinnygirl margarita entrepreneur and erstwhile Real Housewife, as its “chief value officer.” Her duties are mostly those of a brand ambassador. (She was on a billboard in Times Square for MCo’s recent “Look Rich” initiative.) But Rojas says Frankel also gives input to the team internally via product and pricing reviews. Frankel discovered MCo on a trip to Australia and called the brand “the Steve Madden of glam,” after the shoe brand known for taking its own design liberties. She has admiringly characterised MCo’s knockoff strategy as “savage.”

The influencers are another factor that attracted Bastas to the brand. “The whole digital modern marketing strategy they had and the way they were deploying that honestly fascinated me,” the self-described nondigital native says. He hopes to learn how to develop those capabilities in some of his businesses in the health space. There are probably influencers out there somewhere already debating the merits of different brands of iron supplements.

Leaning fully into its identity, MCo has mimicked other brands’ marketing strategies and even duped … humans. It hired Sofia Divene, a beauty influencer popular for re-creating the looks of pop stars, to dress up as Sabrina Carpenter and wander around New York City to “trick” people. It sent a fake Timothée Chalamet to the star’s viral look-alike contest to hand out products.

This year the brand duped Amazon Prime Day, declaring April 4 “National Dupe Day.” MCo offered all products for $4.44, causing a subsequent 10,000 percent sales spike on its site, Rojas says. As part of the Dupe Day campaign, MCo put out a video in which young, stylish women declare, “This is not a dupe—it’s a dupé!” This calls to mind a 2023 Olaplex campaign, in which the much copied hair treatment brand sent influencers a product called Oladupé to make a point that its product couldn’t be replicated.

So many beauty products are so similar, even unintentionally, because there aren’t enough distinct categories or truly unique formula variations to go around. “Everything has been done and redone and remixed, and so there’s only so many different types of products on the market,” Rojas says. She’s not wrong: A search for “lip balm” on Sephora yields more than 150 results. On a crowded shelf, brand world-building—from logos and packaging to marketing campaigns and celebrity spokespeople—is what actually separates one item from another.

MCo’s outer packaging for most of its products is uniformly pink and white with its name prominently displayed, though the right-leaning sans serif font punctuated with a period at the end calls to mind the style of once-cool millennial brand Glossier. But once you take the products out of their box, the individual bottles, jars and tubes have no consistent brand identity outside the MCo logo. Until you look closely, they could be from Drunk Elephant or Laneige or Fenty.

What do the companies that MCo dupes think about all this? “They’re pissed,” says Kirbie Johnson, a beauty writer and co-host of the podcast Gloss Angeles. She notes that many beauty founders spend years perfecting their visual identity, which can “make or break a brand.” It’s their life’s work, so seeing it ripped off can be infuriating.

Charlotte Tilbury, whose pricey, glowy products are frequent targets, released an anti-duping campaign earlier this year called “Legendary. For a reason.” Tilbury herself told the Business of Fashion at the time, “I’m an innovator, not an imitator! When you dupe, you dupe the customer.” At least five of the products on MCo’s bestseller page are Charlotte Tilbury knockoffs. (Tilbury wasn’t made available for an interview.)

The legal counterattacks against duping industrywide have had mixed results. Dyson Ltd. and SharkNinja Inc. have tussled over alleged similarities in their hairstyling tools. Benefit Cosmetics LLC sued e.l.f. Cosmetics Inc. over a mascara design and lost. Charlotte Tilbury sued Aldi over a copyrighted embossed palette and won. Australian company Chemcorp and US-based Tarte Cosmetics both sued MCo and settled out of court, though MCo did make some product changes afterward. Now, Glow Recipe and Sol de Janeiro, two brands alleging MCo has copied multiple products, have ongoing lawsuits against DBG. (Sol de Janeiro didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment, and Glow Recipe declined to comment.)

Dupes exist on a continuum from mere inspiration to outright counterfeiting, says Alexandra Roberts, a professor of law and media at Northeastern University. In a paper about the legality of dupes published in the NYU Journal of Intellectual Property & Entertainment Law, she wrote that what MCo is doing is “risky duping,” which is somewhere in the middle, getting close to infringing on another brand’s IP.

“We’re not here to confuse the consumer or deceive the consumer into getting something they’re not. We’re trying to offer just a more complete alternative than other brands have been able to do,” Barker says. “We do take very careful legal advice at all steps of the innovation process here to make sure that we’re not crossing a line.”

In an interview, Roberts puts it a little differently: “What MCo Beauty does is kind of straddle that line, and they are explicit about it.”

Curiosity Kills the Copycat

Dupe lawsuits usually involve trade dress (a brand’s overall appearance) and trademark (words and symbols that could be protected) and whether those cause consumer confusion between the brands. MCo changed the design of its teardrop-shaped serum bottle, a dead ringer for Glow Recipe’s that was cited in its lawsuit against MCo, “for the US market,” a spokesperson says.

There can be a lot of hairsplitting. In 2024 a lawyer for MCo named Len Mancini shot a segment with the Australian Broadcasing Corp, to defend a product that looked similar to Charlotte Tilbury’s. He explained that the latter brand had a trademark on the phrase “Hollywood Flawless Filter” but that using the word “flawless” alone was fair game; MCo’s is merely called “Flawless Glow.”

Even the word “dupe” itself can be twisted, legally speaking, Roberts says. “Some brands are saying, ‘Consumers are calling this a dupe. That’s evidence of similarity and copyright infringement,’” she says. Conversely, because it’s a dupe and people mostly know a dupe is a different product, brands doing the duping can say it’s evidence of non-confusion.

Bastas argues that companies such as MCo don’t cannibalise sales from prestige brands. “What we do is bring an audience that would otherwise not experience it,” he says. “If anything, ultimately, when they can afford to, they will probably move up to the branded product.”

Mintel’s Hennigan backs up this assertion: “Broadly speaking, it is a different set of consumers” buying dupes. According to data from a 2023 Nielsen IQ report, sales for both dupes and what they’re copying showed “strong dollar and buyer growth” in tandem that year, “indicating that both types of brands can co-exist.”

Some of MCo’s bestsellers, according to the company, aren’t imitations, including a tubing mascara and its vitamin C skin-care range. But right now dupes are mostly what consumers know it for.

“We intentionally went into Target with a heavier mix of dupes,” Barker says. “Largely they are more identifiable for a brand that still has relatively low, but emerging, awareness. So it helps convey the value proposition quickly.” In Australia and in Kroger, he says, about half of its sales come from original products.

Target, for its part, seems to be all-in on dupes, especially in fragrance, a hot-selling category in beauty for the past few years and one that’s generated multiple copycat brands. The retailer carries at least three of them. When talking about MCo, though, Amanda Nusz, Target’s senior vice president for merchandising, essentials and beauty, carefully avoids the word “dupe.”

“We do lead with original design. We do have creative collaborations, and we also know that people are looking for these, you know, smart hacks—budget-friendly ways to achieve a benefit or a solution,” she says, lauding MCo’s “innovation.”

But just because brands can, does that mean they should? “When I see dupes like this, I just think it’s lazy,” Johnson, the beauty podcaster, says of MCo. The company mostly shrugs off these criticisms. As Rojas sees it, “we’re giving the community and the consumer what they want.” And with so many brands selling expensive products that are out of reach for most people, what the consumer wants, as the sales numbers prove, is an affordable and decent lip gloss in fun packaging.

By Cheryl Wischhover

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